Sunday, April 28, 2013

Variables come to life

In my previous post I told you about the variables that I'm going to use. The picture beneath actually looks like what I'm intending to find out with my research!

Although it is in Dutch, it is easy to follow: In the Netherlands, students are put in one of three levels at the age of 12. These differences in education give smart and less intelligent students the chance to work on their own level. That's the VMBO (4 years), the Havo (5 years) and the VWO (6 years). After that, tertiary education can be followed. First, there can be (if the school chose to do so) 'doubled' classes, in which VMBO/Havo and Havo/VWO are mixed. In that way, students who were labelled VMBO have the chance to prove themselves and work up to Havo when they're able to.

What this picture want us to show, is that between the several streams like Havo and VMBO is in the higher years also a stream from left to right. That means that some pupils (6% of the VMBO students in this case) are good enough to follow education on the Havo (after their VMBO diploma).
The red arrow is a problematic one, all those percentages are students who drop out.
The dark blue shows the percentage of graduates.

The picture comes from a research of the education, culture and science ministry (find HERE in Dutch) that did research to the arrows shown above. My research will look into the 'why' beneath it: why are students held back? Or drop out? I'm hoping to find out in the interviews!

Hi there!

Nice to see you're interested in the subject.
I graduated in december 2013 to receive my master of Policy Administration at the University of Twente. Now I'm working at the municipality of Hengelo as a trainee.